Opens with some nice blue skies, acoustic guitar, and text advocating for worker revolution. He starts into a history of Butte MT over some Dirty Three music, tying it into the novel Red Harvest. IWW/Wobblies vs. the Anaconda mining company in early century. The company wins, destroys the unions and lords over evil conditions. Mine runs full-tilt during WWI until a horribly fatal fire sparks renewed union interest… enter Wobbly Frank Little, arriving from Bisbee, making this the Che Part 2 to the Greene film. While he’s sleeping among the workers, the company breaks in and murders him. “All the we know of Frank Little’s time in Butte and all that we know regarding his murder comes from company papers and company spies. Thus official history is company history.”
A couple of Low songs “Mass arrests and deportations begin almost immediately” after the government declares war on organizers. Movie is ingeniously designed to make me angry, ending with the poisoning deaths of hundreds of birds. The company continues to assure residents that the water is safe.
from Cinema Scope 13:
Jason McBride: “Butte’s history – and Wilkerson’s film – is bound up with the entire history of the American left, the rise of McCarthyism, the destruction of the environment, and even the birth of the detective novel … Elegant, almost-still lifes shot by Wilkerson himself recall the work of his former teacher, James Benning.”
Wilkerson: “I’ve always been excited by the Third Cinema … something that took from the high and low culture and was highly politicized, raw, a little less perfectly finished, often with social goals that outweighed pure aesthetics. They would always argue for this notion of imperfect film – a film that was perhaps not aesthetically perfect, but perfect along the lines of what they were striving for.”
